Debut short-story collection from rising, young Minnesota author. The collection combines humor, sport, and a taste of the bizarre to convey the book's main theme: Identity. A picture of your wife standing by a lion cage, anonymously mailed to you. The fine print in the scorecard on the back page of the Sports section-which holds your future. A guy who sits in your favorite bar, reading the same book you're reading. Judd Spicer's characters seem fated to bump up against such oddity-hanging out at the edge of a hum-drum, white collar, beer and basketball sort of universe, every now and then they transcend into weirdness. Now Spicer has put together a book of short stories, Seven Days, which offers a bit of strangeness for each day of the week. On Sunday April 22 we have a guy watching an afternoon baseball game at home; a home run is hit, and caught by someone in the stands-a man who looks just like our hero, and next to him a woman that looks just like his wife. Friday November 19 features a "Miller man" sort who lives alone and is fond of watching the high school girls pass by outside his picture window. On that Friday, however, a girl turns the tables on him-she knocks on the door asking to use the phone, then admits that she'd been watching him. The strange week ends with Saturday September 19, a tale about a business man who, after losing his job, falls into a very different career: entertaining ritzy party goers with his funny-looking face. Tacked on to the seven days are a handful of extra stories, including My Day, where a photographer specializing in restaurant food has delusions of playing in the NBA, and Horsepower, the gem of the collection-an apparently straightforward sketch of a man going through the Sports section at his regular diner. By the way, if you've noticed a lot of sports being mentioned, you've caught on to one of primary motifs of Seven Days. A more intriguing theme is that of the double. The doppleganger couple and voyeuristic guy and girl were mentioned above; in Wednesday October 13 the main character notices a mysterious stranger, reading the same book he is, at the same bar-a book which is itself about a mysterious stranger. All but one of the stories is told in the first person, and the narrator is always a young, white-collar male. The narration is in a colloquial dialect, which tends to weave between present tense and past tense spontaneously, much like bar stories. But unlike bar stories, the pieces in Seven Days do not have punch-lines-they are subtle and open ended, and different readers will doubtless have varying interpretations of them. Outside of this, the stories seem largely unconnected-other than a basketball player named Scooter who is mentioned now and then, the characters each inhabit their separate worlds. And yet they're all quite similar to one another-the beer drinking, basketball watching types that are to be found everywhere in the real world, but which seldom inhabit literary fiction. Spicer deserves credit for that-for sketching the lives of twenty-something bachelors in the real worlds they inhabit, and the alternate worlds they dream of. And for writing about sports in a way no one has since Hemingway. He doesn't quite pull off all of the stories, but most of them are decent, and a couple are something more-stories that will make you stop and think about them long after the book is put down and you're onto the next week's reading.